Quotes from Edith Wharton

Theodora usually found that her good intentions matured too late for practical results.

All the values of the temperate landscape were reversed: the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars.

She had just been for a row on the river, and the sun that netted the little waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its meshes. Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver wire; and her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful limpidity. As she walked beside Archer with her long swinging gait her face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.

She clutched her manuscript, carrying it tenderly through the crowd, like a live thing that had been hurt.

She had once shown him the impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behaviour seemed to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness somewhat mortifying to her vanity.

Mr. Popple, in fact, held that the personality of the artist should at all times be dissembled behind that of the man. It was his opinion that the essence of good-breeding lay in tossing off a picture as easily as you lit a cigarette.

Yes, he would be kind – kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the predatory creature with his mate.

he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.

Passion, the artist implied, would have been the dominant note of his life, had it not been held in check by a sentiment of exalted chivalry, and by the sense that a nature of such emotional intensity as his must always be ridden on the curb.

The idea that any rash answer might provoke an unpleasant outburst tempered her disgust with caution, and she answered with a laugh.

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

Her grey hair was arranged with precision, and her clothes looked excessively new and yet slightly old-fashioned. They were always black and tightly fitting, with an expensive glitter: she was the kind of woman who wore jet at breakfast. Lily had never seen her when she was not cuirassed in shining black, with small tight boots, and an air of being packed and ready to start; yet she never started.

It did not occur to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.

Through the stillness they heard the church clock striking five. Oh, Ethan, it's time! she cried. He drew her back to him. Time for what? You don't suppose I'm going to leave you now? If I missed my train where'd I go? Where are you going if you catch it? She stood silent, her hands lying cold and relaxed in his. What's the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one now? he said.

Because it's against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man's again—I don't mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in THEM.

They belonged to the vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself.

She would not take more risks than she could help, and it was admiration, not love, that she wanted.

Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.

Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent, it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile.

He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.

Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

Nothing about his betrothed please him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the unpleasant in which they had both been brought up.

A man has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of view, and before Selden left for college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it.